HOMETOWN PAPER SKEWERS MITCH

McConnell’s speeches won’t save his beloved legacy after he lets Trump off the hook

BY LINDA BLACKFORD
FEBRUARY 14, 2021 

McConnell rebukes election overturn effort. ‘Our democracy would enter a death spiral’

Mitch McConnell took to the chamber’s floor on Wednesday to declare a reality still unaccepted by many in his party: That President Donald Trump lost his re-election bid and it wasn’t “unusually close.” BY C-SPAN

It was no surprise to see Kentucky’s two Senators vote to let their Dear Leader off the hook again. Sen. Rand Paul, who is turning more and more into an ongoing series of jokes on late night TV, is up for re-election in 2022 and has been a steady suck-up since November 2016, when he changed his original opinion on Trump as a “delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag.”

McConnell, however, has now contorted himself into a strange pretzel-shaped politician hated by everyone. For Democrats, his vote to acquit, shortly followed by a fiery speech denouncing Trump is more McConnellian hypocrisy, coming right after his next best in saying he couldn’t convict Trump after his presidency was over when he delayed the trial until his presidency was over. That’s a lot of contorting.

But he’s not fooling the Trumpists, who now call him a RINO. They see through his winks to Trump voters and his nods to corporate donors who now realize that Trump is bad for their brands. Votes that mean one thing and speeches that mean another don’t get you anywhere but stuck.

Everyone sees through him now. He may have helped create the modern Republican party, but when it most needed saving, he was nowhere to be found. He could have given political cover to his colleagues to stand up to Trump and the attack on Jan. 6, but as I wrote before, the monster he helped create was no longer in his control.

Those two speeches — the first in which McConnell finally acknowledged the election results far too late in the process, and the second in which he excoriated Trump for events for which he had earlier in the day excused him — will be put into the Congressional record. But they will not be enough to give him what he wants: A legacy as a great American statesman.

No, the history books will be clear about those who coddled and engendered Trump’s madness in the name of political power. And in the end, he made sure that Trump would face no penalty or justice for whipping up a storm of white supremacist anger that attacked the U.S. Capitol and killed a police officer. As his one-time challenger Charles Booker noted Saturday, “Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul would have voted differently if the people who stormed the Capitol looked like me.”

McConnell gave a pass to white supremacy, a pass on attacking the U.S. Capitol. He gave so many passes to Trump that we are left with a country that is sick in mind and body. His beloved Republican party has turned into a death cult in thrall to a pathetic and pathological egotist. There will be some poetic justice in watching him try to unravel it over the next five years.

Let him try, along with whatever machinations he’s got up his sleeve as the new minority leader, while President Biden and Congress work toward healing the country, both literally and figuratively with vaccinations, COVID relief, a minimum wage increase and a bold plan to ease child poverty. It’s the kind of action that Mitch McConnell has upended, diluted and blocked his entire career in his quest for personal power. The good of the country has always come in second to the good of Mitch McConnell.

Charles Booker said something else on Saturday: “There is not a day that passes where I don’t think about all the progress and healing we could realize if Mitch McConnell was not a member of the United States Senate.”

That’s what history will remember; there aren’t enough fancy speeches in the world to erase McConnell’s true legacy.


President Donald Trump brings Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., on stage during a campaign rally in Lexington, Ky., Monday, Nov. 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) SUSAN WALSH AP



LINDA BLACKFORD
Linda Blackford writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.